[Dalyia]

There she was, Brigitte thought to herself, as he moved on to another story of his youth and the buffalo hunts on the Great Plains. Wachiwi. She had been taken from her tribe, and given to a Crow chief. They said she killed him, and ran away. Who was the white man the trapper said he saw with her? Brigitte had the feeling that she was following a ghost. Elusive, beautiful, mysterious, brave. She wondered if this was the same Wachiwi who had turned up in France. It was hard to know. More than two hundred years later, the trail was cold. And maybe it didn’t matter. They knew enough. But Brigitte was like a dog with a bone. She couldn’t let go.
For the next week, she and Jan, the librarian, combed the oral histories of the Crow, who were part of the Sioux nation too, even though frequently at war with the Dakota Sioux. At lunchtime, Brigitte and Jan went to a nearby restaurant, and they talked endlessly of the collections of histories that Brigitte was discovering day by day. The stories were totally absorbing and Brigitte was falling in love with the people she was reading about. Talking to Jan about it brought it more and more to life. It was like traveling back in time.
They found nothing for days, and then finally, there she was again, and the earlier story was confirmed.
The man telling this story sang the praises of the Crow chief Napayshni, whom he had known as a boy. He said the chief had two wives and was given a beautiful girl they had taken from the Sioux. He called her a bad spirit and said she had bewitched their chief, lured him into the woods, and killed him. They never found her again. He thought she might have been taken by another tribe, and a trapper said she had been taken by a Frenchman, but she was long gone. The man telling the story was convinced that she was a spirit and not a girl, and she had simply vanished after killing their chief. As she read it, Brigitte knew it was Wachiwi, and she was mesmerized by the mention of the Frenchman. Brigitte knew in her bones that someone had saved this girl. And whatever had happened, she had clearly been very brave, to kill her captor and run away. She knew in her gut that it was the same Wachiwi who had gone to France, and whoever the Frenchman was in the second story, somehow he had taken her home. The rest of the story might never be told. But it was enough. Brigitte knew what she needed to of Wachiwi, the young Indian girl who had been adored by her father and brothers, taken by the Crow in a war raid, and given to their chief; she had killed him to escape, and then a mysterious Frenchman had found her and took her back to France. She must have been a beguiling woman. The second narrator had called her bewitching. But she was no witch, she sounded like a beautiful, fiercely brave young girl, and from there she became a marquise in Brittany. It was an extraordinary story, and a remarkable history to share.
Brigitte hated to leave, but she had accomplished what she had come to South Dakota to do. She had found the traces of Wachiwi she needed to confirm what she believed. She thanked Jan profusely when she left, and felt as though she had made a friend. After saying goodbye, she drove back to Sioux Falls, and caught a flight that would connect her to Boston. She felt at peace, as though a missing part of her had slipped into place. Wachiwi. The dancer. Brigitte wondered what more she could discover about her if she delved deeper into her family history in France. A girl as remarkable as that would have been talked about there too—a young Indian girl of the Dakota Sioux, who captured the heart of a marquis, and spent the rest of her days in France. Surely someone would have written of her there. It had become Brigitte’s mission to follow her trail.